AI & Computer Vision Consultant

20+ years turning pixels into decisions.

From a medical imaging PhD, to real-time drone detection, to leading digital pathology AI at scale — now working independently with teams who need senior computer vision and AI expertise.

  • PhD in Medical Image Analysis
  • Ex-Director of AI Engineering (Ultivue / Vizgen)
  • Former Hensoldt, Definiens / Astra-Zeneca
  • 25+ scientific publications
Portrait of Ruben Cardenes

Services

What I can help you build

Senior, hands-on expertise across the full computer vision and AI lifecycle — from a single hard problem to a full team.

Object detection on street traffic identifying cars, trucks and buses with bounding boxes Person detection and tracking in a train station

AI & Computer Vision Projects

Object detection, segmentation, co-registration, classification and tracking — designed, trained and shipped to production.

DETR D-FINE YOLO U-Net Vision Transformers Optical Flow Siamese Networks
AI infrastructure dashboard showing resource allocation, network status and model performance in a server room

AI Infrastructure Management

Building and operating the infrastructure AI systems run on — from data pipelines to optimized, production-grade inference at scale.

MLOps Data Management Inference Optimization Cloud Infrastructure
Agentic AI workflow and tool integration diagram

Agentic AI

Design and implementation of AI agent systems, workflow automation, and integration with large language models.

Agent Design Workflow Automation LLM Integration Tool Use

Domains of Application

Where this expertise has been proven

Deep, applied experience in demanding real-world domains — not just benchmarks.

Multiplex immunofluorescence tissue image with cell segmentation overlay

Microscopy & Digital Pathology

mIF, IHC and H&E image analysis — 5 years leading AI for digital pathology at Ultivue / Vizgen.

Real-Time Video Processing

Sports analytics, drone detection, people tracking and embedded deployment on Jetson — built at Hensoldt.

Estimated Purkinje myocardial junctions and Purkinje-Purkinje junctions from cardiac vascular modeling

Medical Imaging Research

MRI, CT, DT-MRI and vascular modeling — rooted in a decade of academic and postdoctoral research.

Featured Projects

From GitHub

A selection of open work — the rest lives on GitHub.

Raspberry Pi autonomous toy car prototype with onboard camera

Raspberry Pi Autonomous Car

A self-driving toy car built on Raspberry Pi, using on-board computer vision for lane and obstacle detection. Includes demo video.

Python OpenCV Raspberry Pi
Geodesic distance transform applied to a maze image, showing the resulting distance field

Geodesic Distance Transform

A C implementation of the geodesic distance transform, used for image segmentation and shape analysis research.

C Image Processing
DB Agentic Query system executing a natural-language SQL query over medical imaging data

DB Agentic Query

A natural-language SQL agent for pathology image annotation databases — it inspects the schema, generates and safely runs read-only queries, and can chart the results.

Python LLM Agents SQL
Raspberry Pi video surveillance setup and object detection identifying people in a garden

Raspberry Pi Surveillance

A video surveillance system for Raspberry Pi or USB cameras with Flask — motion detection, live streaming, image/video galleries, and optional AI-based people detection.

Python Flask Raspberry Pi
2D thickness computation on a ring shape, showing the harmonic field between boundaries

Thickness Computation

2D/3D thickness measurement by solving the Laplace equation to build a harmonic field between tissue boundaries — used for cortical and cartilage thickness analysis.

C C++ Medical Imaging

TODO: Project name

TODO: one-line description of the project.

TODO
20+
Years of experience
27
Publications (19 conf. + 8 journal, 1st author)
14
R&D projects delivered
3
Countries worked across

About

From physics to AI, across three countries

My path started in physics, followed by a PhD in medical image analysis at ULPGC and Harvard, and postdoctoral research at UPF and the BESSY synchrotron. From there I moved into industry — Definiens/Astra-Zeneca, Hensoldt, and Ultivue/Vizgen — building computer vision systems for medical imaging, defense and digital pathology at increasing scale and responsibility, leading a teams as Director of AI Engineering and building AI systems from scratch.

Today I work independently, partnering with companies and teams who need senior, hands-on computer vision and AI expertise without the overhead of a full-time hire.

Location Munich, Germany — remote / hybrid
Education PhD, Medical Image Analysis
Research Postdocs at Harvard & BESSY synchrotron
Industry Definiens / Astra-Zeneca · Hensoldt · Ultivue / Vizgen
Languages Spanish (native) · English · German (C1)

Contact

Let's talk about your project

Tell me a bit about what you're working on — I'll get back to you within 1-2 business days.

Location

Munich, Germany — available remote / hybrid